I wake to the sun climbing the crimson wall of the upstairs bedroom at Camelot, the aroma of fresh coffee calling me out of bed. I descend the second-floor stairs to see Pop’s oxygen cord spiraling toward the kitchen. This means he’s beat me to the pot and is already seated to Nanny’s left in his stalwart post, rocking to the hum of a Rio Frio morning on the front porch. I will find them both there sipping coffee and considering the day. Today is a work day for me, and it is 8:30 a.m. I am already late. But I will make time to hold coffee court and contemplate the day before us. After all, how many of these bleary-eyed congregations may we actually have left to share together?

The customary two-week stay following the Fourth of July festivities does little to ease the pain of knowing 50 odd weeks a year I miss these morning porch coffees, watching the skittish white tail deer graze in yonder pasture, noting the slow tug of clouds threatening to thunder away a darn good day in the river, debating who or what might show up at the dinner table later.

Coffee in hand, birds chirping, sun-warmed cement under our feet, and all is right with the blooming day before us. I suck in the sweetness like one of the insatiable hummingbirds buzzing sugar from the flowering vines crawling up the water well just to the ditch side of the oasis I call the front porch, but which Nanny always reminds me is technically the side porch.

This morning’s porch talk is about an upcoming journey to Houston to visit Pop’s heart doctor, and the future quest Nanny will soon undertake to conquer her shot knees – the battle of the total knee replacement looms on the horizon, but we are fortified and prepared for the inevitable.

Draining my second cup, I peel my thighs off the metal chair I have claimed as my spot, which sits in its princess position to the right of Pop’s wobbly throne. I will pull the battered porch door closed behind me, careful not to crush Pop’s oxygen cord in the crack of it, shuffle through the tiled living room, enter a small foyer and climb the wooden stairs Pop built more than a decade before I showed up. There I will toil in the drudgery of my computer work for the majority of the day, holed up like Rapunzel chained to a task desk in the bedroom tower of the second floor. It is in this way that this lucky-to-be-able-to-work-from-home princess can take extended visits to Camelot, earn her day’s wage, take a dip in the river, and still serve court when the dinner bell rings.

I finish my day’s work at five sharp and am headed to the river, which conveniently curls along a portion of our property line skirting the back pasture. I begin with a well-rehearsed gearing up to gear down, which I have mastered since my arrival to this little piece of Texas paradise. Beer check, limes check, cooler and ice check, snack check, towel check, camping chair check, phone check, ear buds check. And from there I sully forth to sit and soak, to think like The Thinker, to ponder today, tomorrow and yesteryear, as Pop advises I should do. He tells me I need to be alone with my thoughts. The good daughter can’t argue this logic.

Today, as the cool Frio tumbles her smooth stones so fast no little minnows can even try to nibble my legs, I sit and sip and ponder as Pop instructs. First, when a hooked-up pair of dragonflies make my knee their own passion pad, I consider how one tells the difference between the male or the female? Is it the male sticking his thing in the back of her neck, or is she the one dragging him around with her thing in his? The submissive desperation in the posterior one’s googly black eyes convinces me she is a she and must be the one being lurched here and there by her lover. She appears relieved he’s stopped to rest. But before long, he pulls them both away, and she gives in to the lurch again. I return my gaze to the sparkling diamonds of sunshine bouncing off the gurgling waters. I wiggle my butt down a bit and dig my toes into the rocky bottom. I’ll be damned if the current thinks it can drag me wherever it gosh darn pleases.

Steadying the feet of my camping chair deeper into the stones, I sink in and press my face to the sun. I take a long sip of a Dos Equis and toast the fact that tomorrow makes a decade since I first pulled up the drive at Camelot, ten years since meeting my birth father, since finding my way to a home I’d never laid a foot on, but somehow always knew was out there waiting for my return.  Gazing up into a powder-blue sky framed by swaying cypress trees, rooted there long before I was conceived, I float freely atop the current of the cool Frio as a decade of memories washes over me.

Ten years post reunion, and I am happy to report that our separate families have merged into just “our family,” the whole mess of us, and we’ve bonded in ways none of us could have imagined. For me, the reunion brings, in addition to Pop and Nanny, an aunt with my own name, cousins, a brother and sister-in-law and a niece and nephew. For Pop, he gets a grand-daughter, two great grandsons, and bonds with my adoptive family and friends I long-ago fused into that treasured bunch.

For both of us, a decade in reunion delivers an endless all you can eat buffet of Forth of July’s, Christmases and Thanksgivings, Easters, fishing trips, birthday parties, bonfires and road trips, our previous nine reunion anniversaries, and that fateful New Year’s night at the Buckhorn, when at 12:01 they called “Happy New Year” and then told everyone to leave. In protest, I stole an unattended bottle of Tito’s vodka right off a patron’s table. I regretted my adolescent act instantly, and within the hour told Pop bad karma was sure to find me in the New Year. Sure enough, three months later, my little writer’s cabin Pop built burnt to the ground. “Yeah, Karma’s a bitch,” he reminded me. 

This afternoon, I watch the little fish fight the current to nibble at my unshaven legs, and sigh nostalgic when the mating dragonflies, this time, light on my arm. They balance there, flicking their little black legs, closed wings jutting like a delicate fin down each twiggy purple spine. They remind me of a river float down the Guadalupe, just hours from Pop and Nanny, and a full decade before we’d meet. That day, my bestie used her fancy high-res camera to capture such a pair of winged lovers on a lingering log, and she mailed me a glossy poster of their coitus a few weeks later. It was so zoomed in you could see the water’s reflection in their beady black helicopter eyeballs.

“When will I ever frame that dragonfly porn?” I wonder — though almost three decades later it still sits curled safely in its tube. Yes, life has kept me busy. I choose not to think about the bitter divorce that left me caterwauling into my pillow for months, the rip in what seemed like the tight tapestry of my life coming just two years into reunion with Pop. Instead, I focus on the day that man I loved so much back then steadied me, coached me, and delivered me that warm July afternoon to the top of the country lane where stood the man I would soon call “Pop” — my biological father.

The rest is history, as they say.

Tomorrow’s celebration is remarkable in that Pop never believed he would live long enough to see us a decade in reunion, but he did. And he is not as bad off as he or I imagined he might have been by now. Having watched my mother and grandmother battle heart disease and COPD, I know the serious fight Pop will face one day. Today, I am glad to say that challenger in the ring, though slinging some hard punches, has yet to press Pop fully against the ropes. But I would be remiss not to admit that we are facing the last few rounds, and the years have taken their toll on us both, but certainly more so on Pop.

The Pop I met a decade ago sprung boots to the ground from the back of his truck bed, drove tractors, hauled furniture, launched boats, pulled in 40-pound catfish with his daughter attached, ran pool tables almost as fast as he ran his mouth, dealt cards till dawn, and could still muster enough breath to scoot across a dusty Texas dance floor till the last note played at the end of the one song he’d waited all night for so he could dance the one dance he had in him with his “favorite daughter.” I don’t have COPD, but neither can I do anything like I could a decade ago.